Social media innovation in political communication: alternative or mainstream?

To date, a majority of research around social networking is based on youth and how young people interact with new technologies. There is a strong sub-text of ‘marketing’ and business-oriented approaches that include research around ‘choice’ and how people develop choices around their interactions with social media. This is mostly superficial ‘cause-effect’ research and while it is used regularly for marketing purposes by companies around the world, social scientists are becoming increasingly wary of the numbers produced by these sorts of surveys and data-mining tools. The research for the most part is based on what ‘consumers’ of technology seek to use to further facilitate the convenience and/or ease of their lives. Here we are measuring something entirely new in terms of examining how this technology changes (or not) political communication. This sort of political engagement, the communicative aspect in particular (neither the activist nor the policy aspect), in which representatives engage in delivering and receiving messages from constituents (multipoint-to-multipoint communication). We examine the literature of ‘old’ media in order to see changes of the new media landscape in the next two sections of the chapter. We understand new media as a tool for social engagement of the electorate in political communication, therefore the terms ‘social media’ and ‘new media’ are considered to be synonyms. Following the literature review we introduce findings from our empirical research of Australian and Hungarian members of the parliaments’ (MPs’) use of Facebook social networking site. In the final part of the chapter we argue that the social media is still an alternative media for the world of politics